


The Call of the Sarlaac: A Wrangler's Demise

by alamerysl, phoenixacid, Yrindor



Series: Tales from the Sarlacc [1]
Category: Organization for Transformative Works RPF
Genre: Collaboration, Crack, Gen, Horror, Tags Are Fun, The Sarlacc is a Hungry Beast, Warning: Wranglers, Wranglers Are Not Adult Supervision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5501120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamerysl/pseuds/alamerysl, https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixacid/pseuds/phoenixacid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yrindor/pseuds/Yrindor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wrangling seemed harmless from the description, but like all things, it had a dark underside. A cautionary tale of a tired young wrangler.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Call of the Sarlaac: A Wrangler's Demise

**Author's Note:**

> There's a reason why "Wranglers are not adult supervision" is a canonical tag.

You start wrangling a bin after a long hard day at work. Your fingers hit the keyboard and you feel another person's hands already there. You brush it off, sure it's just your imagination and fatigue playing tricks on your mind. But no matter how many times you try to wrangle the tags, they keep reappearing in your bins.

You try to move your mouse, but it keeps clicking on the things you don't want. Desperate, you try to leave the wrangling page. You keep pointing the cursor at the X on the top left but suddenly, your arm seizes up. It's like someone has taken control of your body and you are helpless to do anything but watch.

"DONT FIGHT IT," your fingers type. "SUBMIT TO THE WILL OF THE SARLACC. COME, JOIN US. ASSIMILATE."

Horrified, you double your efforts to fight back against this unknown force. But the more you struggle, the stronger it seems to become, until it's no longer one set of hands under yours but many. Dozens of skeletal, ghostly hands dragging you towards them.

You feel the spindly, unrelenting grip tighten around your wrists, your legs, your neck. You see ghostly apparitions from the corner of your eyes, but you don't know if it's because your brain is being slowly deprived of oxygen.

"THE SARLACC HAS SPOKEN... BECOME ONE OF US."

You struggle and you yell, but your body is frozen. The apparitions all join in the chant, their ghostly voices echoing ever louder as they surround you.

"JOIN US."

Bit by bit, you feel your will to struggle draining. You know you signed up to be a wrangler, but you had no idea it would come to this. You thought they were kidding when they added that sarcastic disclaimer to the volunteer application. But you were so wrong.

It wasn't humor. It wasn't staffers being cheeky. It was the dark truth of wrangling. 

Finally, it ends, and the world becomes quiet.

You close your eyes and wake up to darkness. You realize you fell asleep on your keyboard. You wipe the drool off your face and the space bar, relieved that it was just a nightmare.

But sometimes, when you close your eyes, you swear you can still hear haunted voices from the bins. And sometimes, just sometimes, you see a dark shadow at the corner of your reflection.

Meanwhile, you never realize that you've stopped aging. Your house never gets dusty. Everything is pristine -- Except for the bins. The bins that always need cleaning, need sorting.

You never realize that your house is the only thing in existence on the block, because you never go outside.

You clean and you clean. And on the other side of the computer, a little part of you is screaming to be set free. But you can't stop. The bins called to you, and you answered their siren song.

And above you, the SARLAAC watches in contentment. It has caught another wrangler to feed its never-ending appetite. Yet another slave captured to forever clean up its tags. Another wrangler to feed it as it grows...and grows...and grows...

But you don't know any of this, happy to keep wrangling away while your physical body withers away.

The End


End file.
